Tony Blair: 'Bloody aftermath of Iraq war haunts me every day'

Responsibility: Tony Blair, pictured at the time of the Iraq War, airs his views on BBC Radio 3 today

Tony Blair admitted today that he does not pass a 'single day' without thinking about the bloody aftermath of the Iraq War.

But he denied that his foreign policy had helped recruit terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan and described acts of terrorism as 'utterly evil'.

Not acting against Saddam Hussein's regime would also have had 'serious' consequences, the former Prime Minister said in a radio interview.

Speaking on BBC Radio 3's Belief programme - being broadcast at 11 o'clock this morning ahead of Easter - Mr Blair said his decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 had not been taken lightly.

He said: 'I do not pass a single day in which I do not reflect on this and think of the responsibility.

'I think these decisions are the most difficult you ever take, and you cannot and should not take them incidentally because you believe that you have some religious conviction that's superior to anyone else.'

Mr Blair, now an envoy for the so-called Middle East peace Quartet of the US, the EU, Russia and the UN, denied that British actions amounted to any kind of provocation for terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He said: 'I think actually these acts of terrorism are utterly evil, yes I do.

'And when you think of the numbers of wholly innocent people that have died, you see that's why I don't say the people with responsibility for the deaths are the people that remove the bad regime that everyone accepts as bad.

'I say the responsibility lies with the people doing the terrorism because there's no reason for them to do the terrorism.'

Bloodshed: Blair says the war was not to blame for on-going terror attacks like the one last month in Baquba which killed this Iraqi

He was pessimistic about the possibility of defeating Islamist terror groups without uprooting them from within Islam itself, however.

On Afghanistan, he said: 'The people from those groups that back the Taliban that then go in and plant a car bomb - how are we provoking them to do that?

'That's what has to be challenged. And actually one of the reasons why we will not defeat this - in my view - until we start challenging this position within Islam and outside of Islam, is because there is no reason why they should do that.'

Mr Blair, who converted to Roman Catholicism after leaving Downing Street in 2007, told the programme that his religious faith was a 'comfort to me all the time'.

'Comfort': Blair, pictured meeting Pope John Paul II in Rome in 2003, has since converted to Catholicism

He said: 'In the end you accept there is a higher power than yourself and that is both something that should make you fearful, but something that also is a source of comfort.'

He told the programme that his first spiritual experience came when he was ten years old and his father Leo - 'a kind of militant atheist' - had just had a stroke.

Mr Blair said: 'I remember actually praying with the headmaster of the school. I said to him, "Before we pray, I should tell you that my father, he doesn't believe in God."

'And I always remember the headmaster saying to me, "Well, that doesn't matter, because God believes in him."

'I was in a great state of emotion, and then at the end of the day my father was clear, he was going to live. But what I know is it made a - as it would, on a 10-year-old child - tremendous impact on me.'